One word I just can't say.

When I was in Boy Scouts, our troop would often be finished with our activities sooner than the alotted time. Rather than keep eleven ten-year-old boys in the house where, surely, only horrors would be perpetrated, our scout leader would turn us loose out in the yard for a game of tag.

Well, some boys got to play.

My mother would always, without fail, be there in her car out front of the house waiting for me to get out. Early. Sometimes as much as a half-hour early. She wasn't cross-stitching, she wasn't doing crosswords. Just listening to the radio and waiting.

I now realize that the time she spent in the car waiting for me - no small hands tugging at her, no small voices making demands of her - may have been catharsis, her Calgon-take-me-away moment, once a week, waiting in the gathering dark in that 1989 Toyota Corolla. I know that at the time I felt mild annoyance (why didn't I get to stay and play?), but maybe, just maybe, it was she who'd have had the right to be annoyed at my own intrusion on a precious and fleeting moment.

It wasn't just picking me up from Boy Scouts, though. My mother was early for everything. An hour early for work. A half-hour early for the doctor. Always the first to a family function, usually even as the setup was still commencing, a plate of food in her hands. Early dropping me off at my dorm on my first day of college. Early for the steak and lobster dinners I treated her to every semester at the dining commons at school. Early taking me to the bus so that I could catch my plane to Turkey. It became a part of her that made people rely on her even though there where precious few whom she could rely on herself. It was a characteristic that made people smile when they saw her, though happiness was something that I believe she had to fight so very hard to hold onto in her own life.

Two Mondays ago, she was early for the last time.

At 7:30 AM that day, she lost her final battle at 54, eighteen hours before I was to have seen her one last time.

I'd spoken to her two nights before. "What can I bring to you from Indiana?", I asked. "Nothing. Just yourself", she replied. I could hear the oxycodone in her voice.

I tried, Mom, I really did. But you must know that now.

I'm writing this in her chair, where she spent much of her time in her remaining months. I'm writing in the dark; the eyestrain is terrible, but everyone else is asleep and this minor pain must blanch in the face of the agony she endured, day after day, in this hot little apartment. Her bed is made and, beside it on the nightstand, her glasses are just where she left them. Beside them is a picture of her on her wedding day, looking terrified, with her mother beside her. This picture has always been by her bed. Once, I asked her why she had that picture, and that one alone, on her bedside. She told me that not a day went by that she didn't think of and miss her mother and that, if given one wish, it would be to spend one more day with her mother.

At the time that I asked, I just couldn't comprehend what that kind of loss would feel like.

I am about to find out.

***

I haven't posted for more than six months because she, my most ardent fan, couldn't sit long enough at the computer to read it. In the next weeks and months, I - like she always did - will need to find solace in laughter.

Domonic